Protection Paladin Artifact Weapon: Truthguard – Legion 7.3.5

This section of the Protection Paladin guide explains the best possible choices for the Netherlight Crucible, important traits and relic bonuses, and how to progress through your artifact weapon Truthguard. This guide is written by Liminara, creator of TankChat, moderator of Paladin Discord. Updated for the latest patch.

Active Ability

Equipping Truthguard grants you the ability Occhio di Tyr, which damages all nearby enemies, dealing moderate amounts of damage and reducing all damage they deal to you for a small period of time.

Relics and the Netherlight Crucible

The Netherlight Crucible is a new feature in patch 7.3 that allows you to empower your Prot relics with additional traits. It can turn even the weakest relics into viable options depending on how lucky you are with its randomly-rolled traits. Netherlight Crucible traits are randomly selected when a relic is first put into the Crucible, so one Scossa d'Assestamento Tumultuosa may have completely different traits than another Scossa d'Assestamento Tumultuosa! You should always preview a relic's potential traits before you use it or throw it away unless it is a significant item level downgrade. Previewing a relic's traits will bind it to your character, so if you are thinking of trading it to a party member, don't preview and lock it to yourself.

The Netherlight Crucible grants a simple 3-tier, branching tree of traits to each of your 3 equipped relics. You must choose one trait from each tier. The first tier is always a 5 item level increase to your weapon. The second tier is a choice between a light or shadow trait. The third tier is a choice between one of three weapon traits, and your available options are affected by which direction you went in the second tier (left vs. right). Your ability to choose traits for your relics is gated by your weapon's Artifact Level.

You must be at Artifact Level 75 to completely customize your Prot Paladin artifact at the Netherlight Crucible. At current Artifact Knowledge values, this is expected to take several months. Don't worry, it's something to work toward!

Here is a breakdown of Artifact Level values and trait availability:At 60, you unlock the second tier of your first relic. At 63, you unlock the second tier of your second relic. At 66, you unlock the second tier of your third relic. At 69, you unlock the third tier of your first relic. At 72, you unlock the third tier of your second relic. At 75, you unlock the third tier of your third relic. Job's done!

Tanking is, as always, a bit of a conundrum when it comes to making recommendations. If you're tanking cutting-edge, high-level Mythic raid progression, you will want different things from someone pushing high-level Mythic+ dungeons, working on Heroic raid progression, or occasionally filling in during farm raids on an off-spec. Moreover, the item level approximations that most DPS classes are able to make of their traits doesn't really translate to tanks at all due to the lack of functioning SimulationCraft modules for tanks (even if there were, making those pure DPS numbers translate into the broader picture would either be difficult or useless).

Consequently, the best recommendation I can make is to list the traits in order of value, first defensively, then offensively. I will weigh more heavily toward single-target scenarios for offense. Tanks do much better in AoE (and tank DPS is more relevant in Mythic+ than Mythic raid, for example), but single-target is much more reliable.

Tier 2 Traits

Because your choice in Tier 2 affects which traits you can reach in Tier 3, you need to balance both the Tier 2 and Tier 3 bonuses when you make your Tier 2 choice. With the opening of Antorus, il Trono Infuocato, it is now possible to obtain Fregio della Grande Armata, which increases the potency of your Tier 2 Crucible traits by 50%. It might be a really strong legendary if you are lucky with Netherlight Crucible rolls!

Empowered Prot Traits

decent defensive trait, doesn't work on magic damage, and doesn't have synergy with holy shield, but can help with extra Grand Crusader procs.

increases the value of using Ardent Defender as a defensive cooldown to mitigate damage, as opposed to holding on to it, to prevent a death.

very useful for surviving nuke attacks, especially if they are magical. Furthermore helps us with a minor dps buff.

Recommended Prot Paladin Artifact trait path

Original Trait Build Paths

Currently we want to go for the most important Prot Golden traits, while picking up as many helpful smaller traits on our way there.

As it stands right now, all of our golden traits are somewhat weak compared to their earlier versions. Baluardo dell'Ordine is weak due to its low damage conversion, however it does get some value on AoE fights, where it gains absorbs from each target it hits, this also increases it's potency when combined with the extra AS jumps legendary armor. Luce dei Titani is a decent hot, around twice as strong as our Giudizio della Luce talent. Giustiziere di Tyr has lost a significant portion of it's damage, however it is still useful for picking up adds from the range due to the small pulse effect.

In order to get to Giustiziere di Tyr we can go through the left or right side at the bottom, and then left or right on top (picking up Martellamento every single time). I believe that for our general survival the bottom left is stronger, and it's a bigger dps gain at the same time. In a similar sense i prefer increase on Consacrazione duration over judgment critical chance, as it is much bigger dps increase, while judgment offers incredibly miniscule survivability one.

After that we will go with the following path, which quickly gets us to Baluardo dell'Ordine trait, and will help us with our survival as we grind out 5 mans prior to raid opening.

Once we get that, we can quickly pick up Verità Dolorose for AoE trash dps gain, or go with survivability gain from lotp increased healing and AD's reduced cooldown. After we unlock all of those traits we should be at 21 points, which is probably the amount that we're going to get before raids open up.

After we have all the large goldens we can go for any of our leftover minor traits. Conveniently enough we have all of them available instantly. One that is often overlooked, but still useful, is the bottom one that reduces Benedizione del Sacrificio CD by 1 minute.

Relics

If you want to go your own route, here is the basic summary of our Protection Paladin artifact minor traits.